


The Castles and Bastions

by chamomile_and_caramel



Series: tell me the tale that i loved long ago [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Flower Crowns, Gen, Light Angst, Skyblock, Technoblade-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Time Travel, Time Travelling Karl Jacobs, Worldbuilding, his actual character doesn't appear once, i love time travel, this bounces around too much for any definitive tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 06:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29663445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chamomile_and_caramel/pseuds/chamomile_and_caramel
Summary: (otherwise known as, The Author is an Asshole Who Forces Her AU to Suffer Repeatedly By Exploiting Time Travel)Starts off with some background relationship fluff, goes full storytelling mode and then goes back to background relationship fluff. Oh and some weird memory stuff, ending with ominous lore.
Relationships: Clay | Dream/Floris | Fundy, Floris | Fundy/5up, Minor or Background Relationship(s), here we go - Relationship
Series: tell me the tale that i loved long ago [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2179836
Comments: 3
Kudos: 38





	The Castles and Bastions

**Author's Note:**

> This goes all over the place. Ah well. Also: posted on weed number time haha

The couple sat in a field filled with flowers. One was the server admin, a mastermind of chaos. The other was a fox hybrid who’d switched sides out of spite. Now though, the fox was weaving flowers into the admin’s wavy blonde hair.

The blonde turned to face the ginger. “Can you tell me the story of Hypixel again?”

Fundy visibly flinched, before relaxing. “Alright, but sit still. And the legend is of the champion of Hypixel, yes, but it’s the story of another part, less and yet more sinister.” The hybrid continued braiding flowers into Dream’s hair before pausing. Dream didn’t pry, he knew that his fiancé had some strange issue with Hypixelia’s legends.

“There was a king who ruled over half of Hypixelia. Back in those days, it was the Sky Worlds and the rest of Hypixelia, known as just Hypixel.”

“The king was known to be a jack-of-all-trades, knowledgeable of tales even older than this one, and a master of the sword, axe, and shield. He resided in a castle; it’s the biggest one in all of the Sky Worlds.”

Dream turns to face him eagerly once more. “Have people visited?”

Fundy recoiled from the question. “No one can get it. The palace is covered in vines and bushes; it’s fully overgrown. They say ash still blankets the floor like snow does the rest of the land…”

Dream gestured for him to continue. “And! And, besides, the castle is guarded by wolves. The villagers swear on their lives that those dogs are the wild descendants of the king’s loyal pets. It’s a miracle how they lasted through the fire…”

Dream laughed, surprised, slightly nervous, and oddly triumphant. _Where did that come from?_

After a comfortable silence, the fox continued with the legend. “They say that on the king’s coronation, he was cursed. No one knows who did, only that by the king’s first full day, he couldn’t spend not an hour without getting racked with a splitting headache.”

Dream was smiling fondly at his fiancé, so excited for the story. Fundy felt bad for him; the tale was tragic.

“Eventually he sought out someone he knew to brew a potion, a skilled potion maker who dabbled in beekeeping and a good but chaotic swordsman.”

Dream interjected. “Why do you know, and more specifically _care_ about these random townspeople?”

Fundy shrugged. “Everyone puts their own spin on the stories. I suppose this is mine. Although…”

He shook his head and continued; the flowers long forgotten. “The twins instructed the king to make a journey to the nether fortress. When he came back, he was more powerful than ever. And also more threatening.”

Fundy took a deep breath. “And then came the day when…”

* * *

_He couldn’t control it. The pigmen had whispered to him through loud grunts, the wither skeletons reminded him via sharp but short bursts of their unique poison. His time at the fortress had shown him one thing and one thing only: the ruler of the actual Nether would be looking for payment._

_He sat on a golden throne, the ore triggering a sense he didn’t understand. This had always happened, but ever since witnessing the charred gates of the fortress, it was as a part of him had awoken. The voices that had now increased ten fold screamed for the valuable metal, it screamed for the blood of those who had wronged him._

_And at the moment, that was the townsfolk waiting at his feet to complain about their king’s increasingly erratic behavior. The voices in his head wouldn’t stop. They warred against each other, relentless in their demands. He spared a glance to the window. There sat a man whom he recognized as the stranger from his coronation. The man smirked, staring directly at the king._

_The king watched the man with great interest, ignoring the people below him. If he had, perhaps he would’ve noticed their distrustful glares towards one in the crowd. Things would turned differently had he seen a match struck, then dropped onto the marble floors. Marble wasn’t flammable, but the invisible string that had been connected to the dark oak walls sure was._

_The fire spread quickly, engulfing the entire castle. Banners that hung from the ceiling were tattered to shreds. People were screaming, pushing their way to get out of the castle lit aflame. The king, however, was in no rush to leave. For now, something- or rather someone- had gotten his attention._

_The man in the window took out a small knife and cut his wrist. There wasn’t much blood, but it did the trick. A few drops fell into the flames and burnt. The voices in the king’s head were screaming now. He couldn’t tell apart much from the clamor, but one thing stood out: blood for the blood god. He was not a god; he didn’t want to be. He had spent hours in the library, trying to find a way to dim the din of voices, when suddenly he stumbled upon old tales of gods._

_These gods weren’t kind or forgiving. They were forces of nature, as unforgiving as a tsunami, as cruel as the blazing fire ravaging the castle, some as eerie as an eclipse. He did not want to be known as one of those malevolent deities._

_The screaming, both in his head and around him, brought him back to the real world. Fire, there was a fire going on. The king got off the throne and ran out to the door. Bad idea: all the people in the castle were bottlenecking the main exit. Dashing to the back door, he struggled to repress the instinct to merely rip through the crowd and relish in their blood._

_Strands of pink hair were singed, but other than that, the king got out safely. He’d always been resistant to heat. A small, worn road led to a portal so rarely used. For this purpose, in any case._

_He took out a flint and steel, trying not to flinch after all the devastation a match had caused. The still-raging fire was just behind and to the left of him. Relighting the portal, he stepped through. Instead of the islands he was accustomed to, he instead saw an endless, vast expanse of fire and reddish floor. Up ahead, he had seen a bastion._

_All around him were the mysterious piglins that did not even reside in the Sky Worlds’ fortress. He wore no gold other than a small nugget keeping his cloak together and a crown (crowns wouldn’t mean anything to the piglins and their hierarchy), yet they didn’t attack. They whispered amongst each other, halting the primitive trades unique to their species in favor of watching him pass._

_They were treating him_ _like a king. But he wasn’t… only now did it occur to him that the curve and glint of his tusks were reflected in the piglins. Those of the brute variety were even dancing, as if celebrating the return of one of their own from a successful hunt._

_The king stood a little straighter. Though he didn’t know why, this fiery kingdom felt like home._

_He approached the bastion, remnants of a battle still showing. He didn’t yet know what had caused it, though his guess was right. The ruler of this realm had waged a war against rebellious piglins, and many lives had been taken._

_The bastion was a maze of blackstone, lava in every direction. But he could sense when a particular hallway felt important. Turning the corner, he saw the walls adorned with statues of the soldiers that defended the bastion loyally. They didn’t do a very good job, since he had gotten there without a scratch. At the end of the hallway, there was a throne. Sat on top was a blur of fire. Through the haze of heat, he could make out spiraling rods, protectively surrounding the core._

_The spiraling stopped. With a gravelly voice, the Blaze King uttered out a few words. “What have we here?”_

_The hybrid – where did that come from, was he a piglin? A brute? – walked forward. A few feet from the throne, he knelt. “I am Technoblade.”_

* * *

_The blaze levitated a few inches off the chair. “Blade?”_

_Techno reached a hand to the side and swiftly pulled out an axe from a strap crisscrossing his back. Making sure to continue to bow, he held it out._

_The Blaze King stared at it for a moment, and then the flames sped up. It got so fast that Techno couldn’t see the King anymore. A searing pain went through his head, and then stopped. The voices in his head were puzzled. They tried to scream, but they couldn’t. It occurred to Techno that while the voices had gotten far worse a few minutes after escaping, the second he laid eyes on the behavior of the piglins, it had calmed._

_The blaze nodded. “Your kind are pack animals. You don’t do well alone, and the effects of your own bloodthirst diminish when the pain is shared. You have it heightened, so I have no clue how you are still alive. Expectations? Here is another. Train and then defeat the best brute we have.”_

_So the voices were just a combination of instinct and glorified self-esteem. Bloody brilliant. He winced; perhaps saying blood wasn’t the best idea._

_Techno, in his one month in the nether, managed to earn a reputation for being the best warrior in the Nether. Other than, of course, the mysterious brute he was scheduled to go up against. He sat in the stable-turned-workshop that had been allotted to him. He wasn’t a king anymore, and the final expectation to overcome was just beyond his reach._

_What a story. He sharpened his axe on a bench of basalt. It was surprisingly sturdy, perhaps the strongest block in the Nether (other than ancient debris, which is a pain to find and the piglins and their kin treated it like a holy object). He was meant to fight against a piglin brute in two day’s time, but Techno had planned to escape._

_There was a high chance that the piglins would stop him. Their Blaze King had requested entertainment, and a fight between legendary (how he hated that word now; he was not a god, regardless of what the mobs thought) swordsmen would certainly yield a show. But Techno had defeated them all and could just make his way out when they weren’t looking in order to avoid conflict._

_Those blasted voices. The voices craved blood, and they too felt at home in this place engulfed in fire. Techno had cut himself on accident once, while carving a new axe. The voices had roared in excitement. It was as if the voices were spectators at a match, cheering for a gladiator’s blood on the arena. The Romans were wise to appeal to the bloodthirst. He felt as though if he didn’t please the voices, they would destroy him._

_Two things about escaping. The first is that any conflict would designate the attacker as an enemy, and then instinct would take over and it’d be a massacre. The second is that the only was to avoid said conflict was to leave when it would make sense to or when it was possible to not be caught. The problem is that piglins never seemed to sleep. Maybe it was a Nether thing. So that left sneaking out during an event where no one would be looking for him._

_The Lunar Jubilee. Held once a month, the piglins – especially the brute variety – celebrated victorious hunts. As skilled fighters, there was much to celebrate. The centerpiece was a roast hoglin with stuffing of warped root, a delicacy in nether circles. The party would last what was assumed to be a day, since no one really was able to keep track of time in the nether. Time went by differently here. Techno had kept a tally, and by now it had been precisely 4 days in the Overworld. How a month of time was kept in check, he didn’t know. Time worked strangely like that._

_He timed it so that at the moment he made it back to the portal, it would be nighttime. Enough time to reconvene and learn of the fates of the townsfolk. Though he didn’t care too much for them, they were still under his rule and whatever had happened to them was his responsibility._

_He quietly stepping out the door, axe in hand. Techno didn’t ever acknowledge the others in the bastion, so it made sense that no verbal responses were given to the piglins’ greetings. He did, however, wave at them, still more communication than normal. It was a Lunar Jubilee; he was allowed to be friendly. It was really a series of goodbyes, but the cheerful piglins didn’t have to know._

_He passed through the blackstone gates. The gates were usually guarded by two brutes, but as it was Jubilee night, they’d opted out. After all, the piglins would gladly attack any intruders (just one more trophy to add to their celebrations) and who would leave on the happiest night of the month?_

_Wait. A wither skeleton (how’d that get there) stopped him. Techno grabbed his axe and promptly beheaded it. There, let that be a message to the arrogant ones back at the fortress._

_Techno had gotten pretty far away when he let himself look back. Soul flames danced on torches fastened to the walls. They illuminated the gates. He could go back, fight. His mouth twisted in disgust. No, he wouldn’t fight for a king that found entertainment out of death. Turning back to leave the Nether, he added that he wouldn’t fight for the voices either. Traversing through a row of deltas, he closed his eyes and willed the voices to stop. To Techno’s surprise, they listened._

_He tossed his cape over his shoulder, walking away from the bastion and into the portal. On the other side it was nightfall, as planned. The castle was lit up by the lingering rays of sun and embers of the now-calmed fire. He walked with purpose to the village, stopping just outside the village as he realized that he now had no purpose. The castle (and with it, the monarchy he’d never really liked anyways) was gone, the only one who still cared for him had likely retreated and wouldn’t come back down for centuries, and his brothers… well they were off somewhere._

_He snuck behind an alley between two shops he didn’t care to know the name of. Two townspeople talked in hushed, worried tones. The exact words were lost to fallible human memory (alas, Techno did eventually come to terms that he was to be as cruel as the gods in old myths) but the gist of it was spread around the town in the days to come. A mysterious stranger had come with a lighter and set the whole castle on fire. But the most damning part was that an associate of said stranger had been there too, smiling and laughing at the misfortune of the trapped citizens._

_Here, Techno realized that there was officially no place left here. Of course, there were ways off the islands. He waited for a few more hours until all had gone to bed. Then, he dashed to the portal to Hypixel that laid in the middle of the village._

_Once through it, he was presented with much more modern builds, fit for the grand cities that were each home to one unique sport. He shed his cape in some random alley; perhaps once news of the Sky World Tragedy, as it was being called already, reached Hypixel, it’d be sold in a cosmetics shop and a lucky merchant would be elevated to elitist circles._

_Then, he stole a horse from the side of a shop. He rode off into the wilder areas of Hypixel, eventually reaching truly wild land to claim as his own. Technoblade, once-king of the Sky Worlds, was gone, and now merely a story passed down by the village._

* * *

“… passed down by storytellers. And that is the story of the king of the Sky Worlds.”

Dream put his head into the crook of Fundy’s neck and sighed. “Why on earth does Wilbur tell those kinds of stories and advertise them as a fun, short read? Or, a better question, why do you care so much about yet another legend of Hypixelia?”

Fundy stared off into the distance. Suddenly, he recalled something that hadn’t happened in his lifetime.

_A fox, standing near a makeshift greenhouse, attempting to flirt with the plant hybrid in charge of the plants in that greenhouse. He followed the plant nurse’s eyes to the general direction of the nearby castle. He saw the plant’s pretty smile turning to horror as he screamed. The fox turned around to see that in the distance, the king’s castle was burning down. A pair of teens he didn’t know stepped out of a nearby shop, mesmerized by the flames. A flurry of people and even a cat were sprinting out of the castle. The cat got over to the nursery in record time, hopping into the plant’s arms. The cat’s fur was singed. The fox had seen the cat hang around the plant before, and he felt bad for it. It had to be pretty burnt, if the cat’s fur had gone from a fluffy mix of caramel, white, and black to super-short ash colored-_

Fundy blinked. Where the hell had that come from?

Dream looked up. “You alright?”

Fundy laughed incredulously. “I just remembered the fur colors of some random cat I’ve never met before.” Then he gently pushed Dream off of his shoulder and picked up another flower to braid it in.

Somewhere just outside of the flower field, a man with a mismatched hoodie leaned against a tree. He knew the hoodie looked terrible, though it helped to remember key events. Such as half a sleeve of bright yellow, to symbolize the intensity of that terrible fire. He remembered watching from the top of the snow-covered mountain overlooking the palace. Then he’d closed his eyes, concentrated, and promptly fizzled out of existence. The In-Between was a strange place. Some thought it was the subconscious, others thought it was limbo, or for the religious sort, Purgatory. Though a benevolent god wouldn’t steal their memories, or leave increasingly erratic messages that led down rabbit holes.

Many mysteries were yet to be solved; some hadn’t even been noticed behind the blinding whiteness of the eternal winter set upon the place. He closed his eyes, and soon ceased to exist in the eyes of Overworlders. Though to the others cursed with the gift of time travel, he had just come to existence.

He felt like Cassandra. So much power he had never wanted, and no way to use it for good.

**Author's Note:**

> This AU is going to get complicated real soon. In the mean time, have ominous warnings with a side of fluff. ao3 is telling me that there are no characters in the story itself, so let me know if it's not just a copy-paste glitch. Comments are appreciated and I'll clear anything up about the AU if necessary and if I actually know the answer.


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